We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

Education consisted in scolding and pulling the hair. Stern discipline was enacted in the home. Lying was unmercifully punished, disobedience likewise, and in after years corporal punishment was superseded by the menace: “What will people say?”

These facts are quoted from Strindberg’s many-volumed autobiography, The Maid-Servant’s Son, in which he lays down the law with inveterate bitterness against his origin, his childish impressions, the order of society, the system of education, and against all bonds and fetters, customs and duties, which chain a man down from his first days to his last. He knows from the very beginning that he has not the courage to break loose from them, and that is why he pursues them with such untiring and embittered vengeance.

August Strindberg wrote The Maid-Servant’s Son in his altruistic, socialistic period, when he believed in a social revolution that was to bring about the radical redress of his personal wrongs.

Strindberg is in this instance the link of a chain which winds through central Germany, but has scarcely forced its way as yet to the North and the South, for the North and Bavaria are peasant districts, and are, therefore, almost inaccessible to socialism. The middle class with its overflow into the proletariat is the real fostering soil of socialism. From a home like the one that Strindberg describes, the more gifted sons must necessarily go forth as socialists, if they have brains to think and souls to feel; or if they have any aspiration in their blood which calls itself the “honest ambition” of the bourgeois, they as surely become “jobbers” and “snobs”—or if they are geniuses, they aspire to the “super-man,” and with a juggler’s salto mortale flee past their misery into space. Strindberg’s nature was possessed of a considerable share of all three categories. Chiefly genius, which, among the many surprises of life, always prepares for itself the greatest, for geniuses live in a state of continual astonishment at the revelation of the great unknown in themselves, till at last, like Strindberg, they move about with an invisible crown on their heads, one might call it a crowned consciousness, for which they claim respect from all the world. The sure sign of a young bourgeois from a populous town is that he always requires a crowd of admirers. His self-confidence needs to be upheld by constant applause. Hence the striving for recognition, the love of advertising, and the longing to be puffed, which is the peculiarity of the newest literature proceeding from the middle class. Hence the prolonged cries of despair when this recognition or its material expression is lacking. The horizon of the bourgeois townsman is naturally bounded by the thin luminous line of those whom he sees in possession; the men who have enough, and more than enough, who inhabit the golden islands where enjoyment dwells; and whither he yearns to go, to take them by storm as a revolutionary, or enter them in triumph as a crowned genius. It is not their individuality merely which stamps these things with their personal value, they have a priceless, an imaginary worth, and only when they are his—the outward show of refinement, the elegant home, the newest fashion in dress, the woman of the upper class as wife and worshipper—everything “first-class,” in fact, only then does he feel himself in the full possession of his ego. These characteristics show themselves early; they are the phenomena of the age. It is interesting to observe whether the strongest personal emotion in a child is the desire for affection or the longing to occupy the first place. With the boy in the autobiography the last was the case; he wanted to be the favourite in the upper court—in other words, with his father and mother. When he found that the place he coveted was already occupied by his brothers and sisters, he would not accept of his grandmother’s proffered affection, but despised it, for the simple reason that his grandmother was a person of no great importance in the household.

This absence of spontaneous affection is a trait which meets us everywhere in Strindberg’s personal biography and his other literary works; it is a peculiarity that is extremely common in our day, although it is not often met with in geniuses, because genius is usually accompanied by a greater warmth of temperature. It is perhaps partly accounted for by the natural temperament of the people of northern Sweden, who are to the highest degree possessed of what the French call “la fougue,” which burns like a conflagration and not like the all-pervading heat of a continual flame. But there is a deeper reason still which is to be found in the isolation and excessive inadequacy of Strindberg’s nature, the restless, nomadic tendency, the savage impulse which impels him to obliterate his footmarks, to make himself inaccessible, mysterious, terrible, for all of which his autobiography presents many an authentic proof. It may be his inherited, restless, undomesticated Finnish-Lapp blood which feels itself imprisoned in a small bourgeois family, and gazes around distrustfully like a wild animal in a cage. It is the blood of a race that remains always apart, that does not allow itself to be fathomed, but with the true nomadic instinct seeks to wipe out all traces of its own existence. It does not give its whole affection, as a child it has no comrades, as a man no friends, only a few stray acquaintances and boon companions. It is the blood that scents the enemy everywhere, that dreads the enemy yet goes in search of him if only for the sake of the long lonely raids which it remembers in the past. What in other phenomena of the age would signify a dying, a complete withering of the expansive faculty, was in Strindberg a beginning, a youthfulness of culture, so that one can point to him with tolerable certainty as an atavism—a reversion that is driven forward by a tremendous force, a combination of atavism and genius.

There is one special feature of this poverty of feeling in the autobiography which is peculiarly striking and suggestive, it is namely this, that the boy is not only lonely with regard to his parents, his brothers and sisters and comrades, but he is also lonely in his first love. Strindberg has not omitted to give us a study on sex in his Story of the Development of a Soul, as the sub-title is called. Psychological and physiological studies on this subject are sufficiently plentiful in modern Scandinavian literature, and some of them are contributions of permanent value to culture, contributions towards a truer knowledge of mankind, casting a bold and honest light on the unknown territory of human existence, such as will only be understood and appreciated in a more subtle and less prudish future.

With regard to Strindberg’s contribution on the subject, the circumstances are not quite the same. But one thing is certain, that whatever has been confided to publicity on this subject in the north, however far-fetched and plain-spoken as regards the history of the strongest natural impulse, it is but the first seedling of a future literature—a pan-Germanic literature which will come perhaps soon, perhaps not until after our time. In these confessions everything is natural, productive and honest; souls and bodies, physical and spiritual emotions are one. Not so with Strindberg. It would need a searching discussion, a full statement of every single point in his autobiography, in order to prove the apparent and hidden crookedness of the emotions, the poisonous hostility of his terrified gaze at the opposite sex. From the very beginning his relationship to woman is as insipid as is usually the case in the middle class, and as brutal as the wildness of the nomads. The German passion, expanding with the first emotion of love in the desire for a reciprocative affection on the part of the woman, is not to be found. And here it is important to remark that this peculiar trait in his character is the origin of the celebrated drama which bears the device: “Battle of the Sexes.” There is also another point of importance connected with it, and that is that Strindberg from the first represents the man as good, suffering, tender-hearted, normal. That is not psychology, but it is the same in his later works. While his psychology of the woman is very deep, the man who is the unhappy victim of this brute is always the same brave, honest and worthy fellow. There are two sides to that. In the first place it is mere sophistry, in the second it points to a distinctive racial feature.

We find here a resemblance which few people would have looked for in Strindberg, and which certainly no one among his countrymen has as yet perceived. It points to the east, to Russia. Not only to the Russia of Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, but further to the east and deeper into the secret history of the races. It points to Asia, to the barren plains where wandered the Mongolian hordes. Yellow faces with prominent cheek bones and projecting skulls, faces with an expression of cruelty and suffering, envy and greed, terrible conquerors who exterminated the ruling races of ancient Scandinavia and the old Norse blood in Russia, amalgamated the gentle, lyrical, Slav temperament with their own fierce blood, and left memorials of their victories in mounds of dead men’s skulls. Since those days every one who knows the Russian race discovers the same conflicting elements; on the one hand the gentle lyrical faculty, the melancholy sensibility, which makes the Russians born psychologists, makes them the only intuitively psychological people in the world, and on the other hand the brutality of the Mongolian blood which, after long intervals of peace, vents itself in deeds of horrible cruelty. Hence that profound untrustworthiness that lies at the background of the Russian character. And here we must seek the connecting link if we would understand Strindberg. For this same Mongolian blood, thinned, it is true, forms the ancestry of that nomadic race from whence the Finnish Lapps and Strindberg himself are descended. It also forms the lower class in Finland from whence his first wife, although of noble birth, originated. Her features bore traces of the Finnish type as distinctly as Strindberg’s own, and perhaps this accounts for the strong attraction that he felt towards her, for he doubtless felt the need of one of the same type in order to complete himself.

The Finns in Finland are a people belonging to an ancient culture, they are a poetical people, whereas the Russian Mongolians and the Swedish Lapps are quite uncultured. The chief characteristic in Strindberg’s nature is the close proximity of genius and barbarism.

Strindberg is very un-Swedish in his outward appearance. The Swedish type is tall, slender, broad-shouldered, and the complexion, when it is not ashen grey, is fresh and delicate, the head small with fair hair. Strindberg is a strong powerful man with sloping shoulders, and latterly he has assumed a corpulence that is characteristic of the Russians; his penetrating, far-seeing eyes have the uncertain, livid hue which is never found in the north except among mixed races, his jaws and cheek bones are broad and prominent, his hair long, black and curly, the slight moustache turned upwards, the mouth small and pointed as though he were about to whistle, the lips gracefully curved, and a complexion the colour of leather. This phenomenon is crowned with a powerful, square skull. The ears are diminutive and lie close to the head. His hands are remarkably round and small.